But this could not be said of the great mass of Christian people for centuries after. Luther, as the reader is aware, speaks of the devil with as absolute an assurance of his existence, activity, and nearness as if he were a member of his own household. God, he once said, mocks and scorns the devil by putting under his nose such a weak creature as man; and at other times he dwelt upon the hardness of the conflict which the devil has to maintain. "It were not good for us to know how earnestly the holy angels strive for us against the devil, or how hard a combat it is. If we could see for how many angels one devil makes work, we should be in despair." Many devils, he remarks with curious certainty, are in forests, in waters, in wildernesses, in dark pooly places, ready to hurt and prejudice people; and there are some in the thick black clouds, which cause hail, lightnings, and thunderings, and poison the air, the pastures, and grounds. He derides the philosophers and physicians who say that these things have merely natural causes; and as to the witches who torment honest people, and spoil their eggs, milk, and butter, "I should have no compassion upon them—I would burn them all." The Table-talk of the great reformer is full of such robust credulity.
Luther represented, as much as he reformed, his age and country. In these utterances of his we discern the spirit against which the humor and gayety of art had to contend, and over which it has gained a tardy victory, not yet complete. Let us keep in mind also that in those twilight ages, as in all ages, there were the two contending influences which we now call "the world" and "the church." In other words, there were people who took the devil lightly, as they did all invisible and spiritual things, and there were people who dreaded the devil in every "dark pooly place," and to whom nothing could be a jest which appertained to him. Humorous art has in it healing and admonition for both these classes.
Oldest Drawing in the British Museum, A.D. 1320.
It was in those centuries, also, that men of the world learned to laugh at the clergy, and, again, not without clerical encouragement. In the brilliantly illuminated religious manuscripts of the two centuries preceding Luther, along with other ludicrous and absurd images, of which specimens have been given, we find many pictures in which the vices of the religious orders are exhibited. The oldest drawing in the British Museum, one of the only two that bear the date 1320, shows us two devils tossing a monk headlong from a bridge into a rough and rapid river, an act which they perform in a manner not calculated to excite serious thought in modern minds.
In the old Strasburg Cathedral there was a brass door, made in 1545, upon which was engraved a convent with a procession of monks issuing from it bearing the cross and banners. The foremost figure of this procession was a monk carrying a girl upon his shoulders. This was not the coarse fling of an enemy. It was not the scoff of an Erasmus, who said once, "These paunchy monks are called fathers, and they take good care to deserve the name." It was engraved on the eternal brass of a religious edifice for the warning and edification of the faithful.
Nothing more surprises the modern reader than the frequency and severity with which the clergy of those centuries were denounced and satirized, as well by themselves as by others. A Church which showed itself sensitive to the least taint of what it deemed heresy appears to have beheld with indifference the exhibition of its moral delinquencies—nay, taken the lead in exposing them. It was a clergyman who said, in the Council of Siena, fifty years before Luther was born: "We see to-day priests who are usurers, wine-shop keepers, merchants, governors of castles, notaries, stewards, and debauch brokers. The only trade which they have not yet commenced is that of executioner. The bishops surpass Epicurus himself in sensuality, and it is between the courses of a banquet that they discuss the authority of the Pope and that of the Council." The same speaker related that St. Bridget, being in St. Peter's at Rome, looked up in a religious ecstasy, and saw the nave filled with mitred hogs. She asked the Lord to explain this fantastic vision. "These," replied the Lord, "are the bishops and abbés of to-day." M. Champfleury, the first living authority on subjects of this nature, declares that the manuscript Bibles of the century preceding Luther are so filled with pictures exhibiting monks and nuns in equivocal circumstances that he was only puzzled to decide which specimens were most suitable to give his readers an adequate idea of them.